Huawei Honor 7 review: A flagship phone for the rest of us

Huawei has been carving out a cozy niche for itself with their range of smartly-priced phones with spritely performance and multi-day battery life. Their latest flagship--the Honor 7--all but mutes the Huawei branding while packing a good set of capabilities into a nicely priced (and sized) device.

The Honor 7 is built solidly with its alloy unibody imparting a reassuring heft. On the right is the volume rocker and power/lock buttons while the Nano SIM/MicroSD card tray is on the left. Note that while there are two separate SIM slots in the retractable tray, only the first one is active in the Honor 7 sold in India. While there exists a second SIM slot, it is a dummy--only the microSD components of the slot can be used.

Located beneath this tray is a programmable button that can be configured in the Android phone settings where specific actions can be assigned to a single press, double press and long press--very useful for quickly launching actions and apps. This is an especially utilitarian feature; one that significantly cuts down on time for accessing frequently-used functions.

At the top of the device is the standard 3.5mm headphone jack along with an infrared transmitter that lets you transfer the functionality of the remotes in your house to your mobile phone. However there is no pre-installed app to use this functionality--you’ll need to grab one of the many available on the Play Store.

There is a subtle depression at the rear, below the main camera--that’s the in-built fingerprint sensor. It also doubles up as a control element, where it can be used to pull down the Android notification bar, answer a call, take pictures and the like. All this becomes especially intuitive given its particularly easy access via the index finger of the hand you’re holding the phone with. Which ties into the overall ease of use with this phone--its inherently comfortable 5.2-inch form factor makes it a breeze to hold and use single-handedly, even if you have particularly small hands.

The screen packs a Full HD 1080x1920 resolution making for a very sharp 424 ppi pixel density. Being an IPS screen, brightness levels at even extreme viewing angles were spot on with very little perceptible brightness and color falloff. Screen legibility in direct sunlight was acceptable, though not outstanding.

The Software

True to Huawei, this phone also uses the skinned EMUI (v3.0) here running atop Android 5.0 Lollipop (the company has announced a planned upgrade to Android 6.0 Marshmallow, expected to roll out by early 2016.) Among the key abilities in EMUI are the shortcuts on the lock screen that enable quick access to the key apps like the camera, torch, calculator etc. Also the wallpaper on the lock screen--known as covers--can be loaded locally from phone, and these cycle each time the screen is woken up. Like other Chinese ROMs, EMUI also has no dedicated app drawer--all app icons exist directly on the various screens. While this could quickly result in clutter, they can be arranged into folders and the number of screen themselves can be custom defined to help brings things in order.

EMUI is also especially adept at system-level functionality such as the battery tool that offers in-depth control over how apps utilize battery power, as well as a particularly powerful storage manager that finds and removes unwanted file and application clutter.

Performance

Unlike many other phones that are powered by Qualcomm, Microtek or Intel processors, the Honor 7 uses their own platform--the HiSilicon Kirin 935 chipset. It packs two separate Cortex processors clocked at different speeds, each with four cores. Paired with 3GB of RAM, the phone sailed through even heavy multitasking and with memory-intensive apps. The area it did lag though was in pure graphics performance, which can be attributed to the middle-of-the-road Mali-T628 MP4 GPU.

The camera

The camera is one area where the device truly brings its game--it uses a very capable 20MP Sony IMX230 image sensor for the primary camera, with an f/2.0 lens that has sapphire glass protection. Accompanying it is a dual-tone flash that makes for more naturally lit photos in low light conditions. The camera also uses Phase Detection Autofocus that results in speedier focusing. Out front, the camera is a respectable 8MP and even this one has its own dedicated flash along with a panorama mode--just what the selfie doctor ordered.

The in-built camera app has numerous photographic interesting modes including Light Painting (for shooting car tail light trails at night, light graffiti, silky water, and long exposure star tracks,) Good Food (a mode that delivers better close up shots of food,) and the mandatory Beauty mode. We found these modes--especially the light painting modes--worked surprisingly well, producing pleasing results in these low-light and low-shutter speed situations. These aren’t modes you’re likely to use very often, but they’re good to have when the opportunity arises.

There is also a ‘ Perfect selfie’ mode, requiring the user to take a shot from the front, side and looking down, and supposedly uses this image information while applying tweaks (thin face, enlarge eyes, smoothen skin, whiten teeth etc.)

Both cameras can record Full HD (1080p) video but unfortunately there is no 4K video recording or the ability to shoot at high framerates; features that are increasingly prevalent in today’s mid to high end phones.

All of this is powered by a reasonably hefty 3,100mAH battery, which easily sees it through two days of regular use comprising a mix of calls, web and social media browsing and casual gaming.

The Honor 7 embodies a pleasing mix of capable specifications and numerous useful features. And with its enticing pricing, it serious ups the bang-for-the-buck quotient among other flagship phones.

What we liked: Solid build quality, sharp and vivid screen, packed with photographic features

What we didn’t: Sub-par graphics performance, no dual SIM